“Who is Olympia? Where is she now? Is she still alive?” I shouted these questions as I ran into the darkness of the palace. The Clockwork King was stronger than I, physically so much more dangerous. Only, I had my questions to protect me, and his failure to understand Olympia. “Why did you lie to me yesterday? Why did you fail?” I chased him, quite mad, hurling questions, demanding answers owed me.
Did she have other lovers? To whom had she granted her favors? Or was she yet virginal? How could I make her want me the way I wanted her? What things did she desire now, and what men? What gave her most pleasure in her mind? In her body? What should I do to win her love?
Beyond the music of the organ there began to come the crash and thunder of shells exploding. The army had followed the retreating automata, and now as we raced past the windows explosions flashed in the distance. The violence inside my mind was made real, rage and lust and need, the lightnings in my mind. “What does she cry out in her moments of ecstasy?” I shouted.
I paused. The Clockwork King had led me into a darkened chamber. Then a fire flickered in a hearth; and it was a familiar hearth. I froze, seeing, impossibly, my home. The sitting-room in which I had lain ill years before. In which I had contemplated murdering my best friend. And everything in it was reversed, as though I had crossed through into a land on the far side of the mirror. At once I felt again the fever of my childhood, felt thought recede, felt nightmare overtake me. “Why are we two and not one?” I muttered.
A shell exploded outside; I understood three things at once. I understood that the mind of the Clockwork King was so powerful as to deduce the circumstances of my earliest life, and that nothing of me was unknown to him. I understood that he knew what would happen on this night, knew that Kreisler and I would bring the Prodigy to him, knew that I would ask the fearful question and chase him even so far—and so he made this room, to confuse me. But also I understood that for all his knowledge of what would come, he had found no way to evade it.
Had I understood these things rationally, I would have realized that he was, therefore, limited. But this was not the case. I screamed, and ran to the mantle-piece, and took up one of the candlesticks upon it, and threw the candlestick at the mirror. The glass shattered into a thousand shards, and I threw myself up and through the space behind it, shouting “Why do I not want it to end?”
And on the far side of the mirror was an odalisque, a harem-room, filled with women, young, beautiful, veiled and nude, all turning to look at me as I fell into their home, spitting froth from my lips, bleeding from the mirror-glass that had cut me on my way. For a moment I thought that this was where the Clockwork King satiated his clockwork lusts, and I felt it keenly that he should have for his plaything whatever he might pretend to desire while my own desire was so far from my grasp.
But then I saw that among that harem were all the women of the court, and the Empress chief among them, in the guise of Venus. Not all the women of the court: Olympia was not there. But every other woman, and in their arms all the males of the Imperial court, disporting themselves as they pleased, the reality their dances had symbolized. As though I were seeing the hidden desires of everyone I knew being acted out before me, and I had no way to go but forward. I rose and began to cross the harem of the Clockwork King, and all the faces of all the men turned to me, and then I saw that they were all my face. It was I in the arms of every woman, it was I disporting myself for the amusement of the Queen of Love, yes, it was I too who was her lover, who was the male principle of this dissolute council.
A darkness passed before my face; I felt myself stagger. My fever. My wounds. Sight and sense returned before I fell to the ground. I pushed on, howling out my questions: “Who am I, that I should love? By what right do I love, what have I done that I should deserve it?” No-one there dared to stop me as I drove myself on, and stumbled into a long dark passage.
When the passage opened out again, I seemed to be inside a ruined mausoleum. There was broken stonework to every side, statues toppled and wrecked. A heap of fallen stones on the far side of the room served as a stairway up which raced the cloaked figure of the Clockwork King. Light came from a fire outside of the room, set by a fire or gunpowder explosion, flickers and flashes, and in the voluptuous shadows I seemed to see the worst of the automata, the gryphons and unicorns and foreign gods, all come home at the command of the roaring organ far below me; but they were moving at their own will, I saw them, reaching for me, and I could not say what was real and what was hallucination.
“Why must Theodore die?” I cried, staggering through them. “How will I kill him? Why does she mean more than him?” They receded before me, and I reached the pile of stones and started to climb after the Clockwork King. “Who would I not kill for her?” I shouted. But there was no answer.
Then there was fresh air upon my face, and the warmthless light before dawn. And the sounds and smoke of war.
I had chased the Clockwork King to a rooftop garden, a thick mechanical forest where evenly-spaced metal trees shadowed iron sod. The King staggered away from me, and I jumped upon him. He fell, spread out beneath me. We rolled over together, and brass arms fell upon my back, crushing me up against him.
“Why does no-one see the truth of Olympia but me?” I demanded. Roughly I tore the hood from the mirror that was his head. “How can I touch her, break her, to make her feel me?” His arms, embracing me, ground my ribs against each other and I could not breathe. Bleeding, feverish, drooling, my fingers scrabbled over smooth glass. “Why does love mean pain?” I gasped, and shattered the mirrored head of the Clockwork King, which was after all only a close-fitting helmet, and underneath was a human skull.
The skull said: “Can a shadow weigh desire in a scale, or a serpent measure art by a cord?” And then the Clockwork King fell back, and did not move, done in by the fatal question he could no longer keep from asking. His dead arms bound me, and for a time I lay atop him, drifting in and out of wakefulness, gunfire and organ music surging in my ears. I thought it odd that the question he could not answer was not, after all, unanswerable; then it seemed to me that he could not answer the question not because he did not know the answer, but because he did not dare to provide it. To ask it was to answer it. To answer it was to admit his ruin. Thus I had killed him with a question.
Then I was being pulled free of the corpse of the Clockwork King. I screamed as my flesh was torn again. But I opened my eyes, and I saw the glory that preceded the dawning sun, and saw who it was that had freed me, and then knew I was mad, mad beyond hope of return. “You,” I said. “Here.”
“Yes,” said Olympia. Did I love her? Or did I love only the image of her in my head? At that moment those two things collapsed into one. “I followed the automata when they retreated from the city,” she said. “For I am being chased.”
Behind her, climbing up the stone stairway from the Palace of Wheels-Within-Wheels, came Theodore. He had a new sword in hand, twin to his old one, which I still, somehow, held. “Ernst,” he said. “Stand aside.”
“No,” I said. He stepped forward, left hand out.
“Let us be reasonable,” he began.
I stabbed him through the heart.
He blinked, and stared at his own blade projecting from his chest. He whirled away, wrenching the sword from my hand. “Ah,” he said. “The Clockwork King . . . he said that I would perish here.” He fell to his knees, and then upon his side, and died looking no man in the eyes.
For a moment in the mechanical forest Olympia and I stood, silent. The powerful throb of the organ music made a strange harmony with the shelling and gunfire at the edge of the fair-ground. I took Olympia by the shoulders. “He is dead,” I said. “He was a thief and a killer and a seducer and maybe a rapist and a traitor, for all I know; but he was close enough to my soul as to be a part of me; and now he is dead.”
She said nothing. I stared at the light of dawn playing upon her face. Then I kissed her.
We fell to the ground, w
hich was no longer metal but true forest land, and there were trees above us with birds singing to the accompaniment of the great organ, and fireworks exploding all around us, and the sun shining; and we were there together, and loved one another.
When I returned to myself it was past noon. Some noise had woken me from a sleep or daze. I sat up. I was still upon the roof of the palace, its metal soil, its artificial forest. What had happened? What had really happened, and what had been dementia? The Clockwork King was dead nearby. So was Theodore. But the metal of the place was unchanged. And Olympia was nowhere to be seen.
I looked over the edge of the palace. Living soldiers, wearing the colors of the Empress, were demolishing the city; having shelled it from a distance for some hours, they were now evidently brave enough to approach to complete its demolition. The automata, such as were intact, were everywhere immobile. I watched the soldiers awhile, feeling the pains of the past night; then I descended into the palace.
The Prodigy was asleep, curled up upon the seat of the organ. I woke him. He claimed he had played the organ all night, until he fell asleep; he thought that Kreisler had climbed into the pipes of the organ and never come out again. “He said something strange before he did, though,” the Prodigy told me. “He said, ‘Now I see the answer; I see the way by which the answer will come; sanity is, after all, madness, and our words are too small for the truth.’” I shook my head, and we left the palace.
Outside, the soldiers glanced at us, and went about their chores. We clearly were not the enemy. It was a grey day; high clouds had rolled in, and a thin rain fell.
I left the Prodigy with a colonel, to whom I gave instructions to see him carefully back to V—. I trudged through the city of the automata. Its every proud tower had been thrown down. Its jewels were scattered about in the mud underfoot; most of them quartz and pyrite.
I came to the gatehouse with the hall of mirrors. The hall was dim, lit by the dull light from outside, bereft of mystery. Only glittering shards upon the floor, throwing slivers of me back to myself, recalled what it had been.
Then I saw, in one corner, a single mirror untouched. Whole. And madness rushed full upon me again, and I put my hand upon the glass.
I said, “Can a shadow weigh desire in a scale, or a serpent measure art by a cord?”
And at what I saw then, I gasped aloud.
~ ~ ~~ ~
Matthew David Surridge is a freelance writer who lives in Montreal. He has written non-fiction for a number of venues, including The Comics Journal. His story “The Word of Azrael” is forthcoming from Black Gate.
THE ALCHEMIST’S FEATHER
Erin Cashier
I HAVE ALWAYS DONE as I have been told, and most of my actions have not been kind ones. I know because the Alchemist did not always tell me to forget and so, trapped inside my jar, I was cursed to remember.
I dreamt the dreams of dolls, and those were the times I could see the past most clearly. I remembered the time I crept inside a true man’s workplace to hide false evidence. And when I delivered a botched love potion into a poor serving girl’s tea and hid behind a jug of milk to watch as she retched black blood and green bile across the floor.
Tonight as I dreamt, I became aware that these were horrible things. They did not bother me at the time, and they do not bother me now, but I am aware of them in a way that I have never been before. And in the morning I realize one of my fingers is gone.
~ ~ ~
“I need more time,” the Alchemist protests, when the Prince’s latest emissary visits.
“You always need more time.” The emissary walks around the room with a curled lip and an arrogant eye, then picks up my jar and shakes it hard. I rattle around limp inside as I’ve been told to do.
“I’m getting closer.” The Alchemist holds up a small feather for the emissary to inspect. “This is a crow feather—”
“The Prince wants phoenix feathers. We can pick up crow feathers on any street in Vienna.”
“It is a process. You cannot just skip to the end and create a phoenix!”
“What use are crow feathers to the Prince?” The emissary takes the black curl of proof with his free hand. “I’ve seen better tricks on street corners.”
“This is not magic—it is alchemy!” the Alchemist protests and pounds a nearby table. Implements jump and a cloud of charcoal powder billows. “I cannot just paint feathers and make up a pretty story. Is that what the Prince wants?”
“The Prince wants the real thing,” the emissary says, shaking my bottle roughly for emphasis. “But he would like it quickly. He’s paying you a lot of money. For your sake, and the sake of that rodent you call a servant, you’d better hurry.”
“My supplies are low—”
“You’ve got all you’ll get. Your next shipment will be your last. Either you can do it soon, or not at all.”
The Alchemist tilts his head and raises an eyebrow. “If the prince hadn’t put his sword into every whore in Vienna he wouldn’t need them so badly.”
“Treason does not become you, Alchemist. Finish it before his wedding day so that his ‘sword’ might be healed.” The emissary flicks the small feather at the Alchemist and it floats to the ground on a jagged path. He holds my jar tight and makes a show of thinking about its destruction before snorting and setting it down on the table, intact.
~ ~ ~
A night passes. Things happen. I am told to forget and I must obey.
~ ~ ~
“Play with the girl,” the Alchemist commands, releasing me from my jar at dawn. There are bread crumbs in his beard and bits of bacon in his teeth. He spills me onto his desk where the small black feather is now mated with a white one, both of them aligned side by side atop a research book full of symbols I cannot understand. I drop off the edge of the desk with a fall and a tumble, in the nature of small things, landing in a crumpled pile before picking myself up and setting off to find Maria.
Maria smiles at the sight of me, as I clamber up the end of her bed. I walk the hills of her slight body and she pinches her nose.
“You’re the smelliest doll ever, Alrun,” she informs me, and I know it is true because I’ve been given a nose. The lab was a sulfurous stinking place; not even the thickest cork could keep the scent out of my jar. “Shall we go outside now?” she asks and I nod.
Her stomach growls. “I’ll grab the crust, if he’s left any,” she says to herself and places me upon her shoulder.
With a rind of bread in tow, I sit on Maria’s shoulder as she trots along the path to reach a glade where our cabin’s smoke is unseen. In a fashionable city, no one would ever tolerate the stench that rises continually from the three fires he keeps lit. We’d been in a fashionable city, once. We’d had gold once, too. But those times are past. I have forgotten most of them because so much time has elapsed—newer memories crowd out the old ones in my small and wooden head.
That, and perhaps the things that were made to be my eyes were not so very good. I was ill-made, and I am falling apart at a prodigious rate. Today, another finger is lost.
“Shall we dance, Alrun?” Maria asks and I nod. She holds me out, one of my hands in each of her thumb and forefingers, and she twirls me around in the white-gold sun, singing a song of her own creation. She has a voice like the birds she sometimes protects me from, when a curious sparrow becomes too interested in the shiny bits that are my eyes or the gummed string that is my hair. She sings and spins until both her body and throat are tired and then winds down to set me in the pocket of her lap.
I am quiet while she weaves me skirts out of grass and makes tiny wreaths for my hair. She places one of these upon my head and I reach up to help her adjust it so that I can see past an ivory petal of a flower and she gasps.
“Another finger gone! I didn’t—”
I gesture that it wasn’t her doing.
“You’re sure?” she asks, and I nod strongly. “I wish you could tell me what happened.”
I don’t know what happ
ened. I have been told to forget. Even if the Alchemist had carved lips for me, that could not change.
“I can make you new ones, I think.” She picks up pieces of twig and whittles them down with her fingernails, pinching off wooden strands.
I watch her silent concentration. How many girls have there been? Three, at least. Before that, I hadn’t bothered to count. But there was always one, a little girl, aged just eight or nine. What has become of the rest of them? I cannot remember these things, either.
But I think I like this one most. I don’t know why, precisely—maybe it’s because Maria has given me a name, something the Alchemist himself has never bothered to do. However, if the past is any indication, there will come a time when she is forgotten to me too.
And this, strangely, hurts. I stare at her, trying to imprint her particular face on my mind, to hide it someplace he could not take it from me. I see her truly now. The dirt that seams where her hair and skin meet, the bruises along her upper arm from his fearsome shaking, the cracked nails that even now become moreso as she embarks on the serious task of creating new fingers for me. She smiles, showing teeth like lines of the chalk the Alchemist uses to draw symbols on his bench, and passes me her efforts, two splinters of the right size and proportion to replace the fingers that I’ve lost.
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